Dolls

Best known for making and starring in yakuza films — defined by their simultaneously fluid and abrupt shifts between vicious violence and austere sentimentality — stand-up comedian-turned-actor-turned-filmmaker "Beat" Takeshi Kitano occasionally throws fans a ringer. This defiantly odd, glacially sad compendium of three overlapping love stories was inspired by the highly stylized conventions of Bunraku theater (in which black-clad puppeteers guide large, expressive dolls through sophisticated stories of love, sacrifice and implacable fate), and by a memory dating back to Kitano's early career as a young club comedian. The haunting image of a pair of street...